Who knows what “Liberation Day” may eventually signify in the history books: the end of the post-war trading regime, the acceleration of automated manufacturing in America, the most costly bargaining ploy in history, all of the preceding or maybe something else entirely. To Donald Trump himself, the term used to have a more frivolous meaning, if not a more innocent one. One spring morning in the mid-1990s, Mr Trump telephoned a consultant to his company with a gleeful announcement: “Today is Liberation Day.” Later, as the two walked to lunch at the Plaza Hotel, Mr Trump was “gawking at the many jacketless women along the way”, Maggie Haberman reports in her biography of Mr Trump, “Confidence Man”. “To him,” she writes, “the term had a very specific meaning: it was the first warm spring day, when women stopped wearing coats and ‘liberated’ their upper bodies.”
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